With an aim to provide an option that runs directly on users’ machines for web page translation and, at the same time, preserve their privacy, a new Firefox Translations add-on by Mozilla has been released.
Developed under the Bergamot Project, the translation tool is available for languages including English, Spanish, Estonian, German, Czech, Bulgarian, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese, and Italian. Work is being done on languages including Russian, Persian (Farsi), Icelandic, and Norwegian Nynorsk.
The Bergamot Project Consortium is coordinated by the University of Edinburgh with partners Charles University in Prague, University of Sheffield, University of Tartu, and Mozilla.
Currently available for download on Firefox Nightly, Beta, and in Firefox General Release, the Firefox Translations add-on provides an automated translation of web content done locally, on the client-side.
The add-on will translate the text in and from any language by using the user’s computer resources and the data will not be sent to the cloud for processing. It is currently available for translation in eight languages, and work is in progress for further four languages.
According to the Mozilla two novel features have been added in the Firefox Translations tool. The first feature is the translation of forms, while the second is quality estimation of the translations where low confidence translations should be automatically highlighted on the page, in order to notify the user of potential errors.
On the other hand, Mozilla’s biggest competitor Google Translate offers translation support for a total of 133 languages used globally. Google announced to add Google Translate support for 24 new languages, supported by machine learning during the recently held Google I/O.
Google added eight Indian languages including Assamese and Bhojpuri to Google Translate. The other Indian languages are Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo and Sanskrit. With the addition of eight languages, a total of 19 Indian languages are supported by the service.
Other than Indian languages, Aymara, Bambara, Dhivehi, Ewe, Guarani, IIocano, Krio, Kurdish (Sorani), Lingala, Luganda, Oromo, and Quechua have been added to the Google translate. Pichai in his keynote address said that Google Translate has been a crucial tool for newcomers and residents trying to communicate with one another in the countries around the world.
According to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, the addition of 24 new languages is aimed to make Google Translate universally accessible.
Also, Read Here: Assamese, Bhojpuri among eight Indian languages added to Google Translate